Measuring performance
A new system or process may benefit your organization, but if you don't have any means of measuring it to determine effectiveness, you won't really realize its full benefit.
Have you ever evaluated your organization's quality management system? Which techniques did you use? How did you benefit from using these techniques?
Evaluating quality management systems
Quality management systems can be evaluated using different techniques, and the process can vary in scope.
Common techniques for evaluating a quality management system include the use of:
balanced scorecard data,
managerial review tools, and
ISO 9000:2000 management review.
Balanced scorecard
The balanced scorecard is a measurement system that organizes a company's strategies into four balanced categories.
The system was developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton to encourage organizations to focus on not only financial data, but also intangible assets necessary for long-term growth.
The balanced scorecard supports four key measures, or metrics, which are a key part of balanced scorecard data. These measures fall into different categories, including financial and customer metrics.
Financial
Financial metrics are used to measure a company's gains, and include factors such as profitability, return on investments, and assets, for example.
Customer
Customer metrics are intended to keep a company's customers and clients satisfied.
Roles in implementation
Every employee within an organization plays a part in the deployment of a quality plan. As the quality plan is rolled out, each person is assigned a particular role, whether he is upper management, middle management, or an operative employee.
In most organizations, upper management comprises executives and senior officers who are responsible for implementing the policies and directions that define the company. Upper management plays a key role in quality plan deployment.
Senior management roles
Establish and promote the quality policy
Focus on customer requirements
Establish and review quality management system
Decide on actions
Establish and promote the quality policy
In quality plan deployment, upper management is responsible for establishing the organization's quality policy and objectives. Upper management also promotes the quality policy throughout the company so all employees are involved and aware of the policy.
Focus on customer requirements
Upper management is also responsible for ensuring that the organization's focus remains on customer requirements, and implementing processes that allow these requirements to be fulfilled.
Establish and review quality management system
Another of upper management's responsibilities is to establish, maintain, and regularly review the quality management system to ensure it remains effective. As well, upper management should make sure that the necessary resources are available at all times.
Decide on actions
Upper management must regularly make decisions about what actions to take regarding the quality policy and related objectives, as well as actions for improving the quality management system.
Example
Emily is a senior executive at a food processing company that is in the midst of deploying a new quality plan.
Emily played a significant role in developing the plan; she helped establish the key objectives the plan is meant to achieve, which include becoming an industry leader in quality food products that are affordable for consumers.
Quality plans
Have you ever tried to achieve a goal without first making a plan? If so, you probably quickly realized that it would have been beneficial to have outlined what you hoped to achieve, and how you intended to do so.
A quality plan is a set of documentation that outlines an organization's quality practices, processes, and resources relating to a particular product or service. Quality plans help companies define the objectives they hope to attain, document standards and policies, and specify procedures for change.
Quality plans structure
Think about a plan you've worked on in the past. What steps did you take? What was included in your plan? How did you benefit from having a solid plan in place?
Quality plans can take many different forms depending on what outcomes they are expected to produce.
No matter what form they take though, quality plans generally all define
quality objectives
steps in a process
allocation of resources
documentation to be applied
Quality objectives
The quality plan should identify an organization's key quality objectives. For example, a company might specify that dependability and aesthetic appeal are its main objectives when developing a new product.
Steps in the process
A quality plan should define all the steps in the processes that a company uses for its operating practices and procedures.
For instance, a manufacturing company would clearly outline the steps involved in making each of its products so that quality standards could be maintained.
Allocation of resources
An organization's quality plan should define how resources, responsibilities, and authority will be allocated throughout each stage of a process or project.
For example, the manufacturing company might specify which team would be responsible for making each product, as well as who would be in charge, and how much money would be allotted for each stage in the process. (...)
Mission statement
Nearly every company employs a mission statement that serves as an embodiment of its goals, philosophies, and purpose.
A mission statement can be as simple as "We aim to make our customers happy" or much longer, depending on how a company hopes to portray itself.
A company's corporate mission statement outlines its current state, while its vision statement describes what state it hopes to achieve in the future.
The quality function mission must be aligned with both the mission and vision statements, and should advocate concepts related to quality, such as continual improvement and customer satisfaction.
And, it’s not always formalized, even if this would be an extremely good idea as part of the process of developing a business or an organization.
Developing a quality mission
Developing a quality mission requires collaboration among all organizational units, and this happens using several steps:
identify the product or service provided
determine whether the product or service is needed and what the target market is
agree on standards and applicable measures
quantify the gap between customer needs and current practice
make improvements, track and evaluate results, and maintain gains
Identify the product or service provided
The first step in developing a quality mission entails identifying a particular product or service to be provided by the quality function.
Quality characteristics of products include elements such as durability, safety, and reliability, while quality characteristics of services can include courtesy, credibility, and communication, for example.
During this step, Ann, a quality manager, determines that the quality function will provide a new product at a reasonable price in order to better compete with key competitors.
Determine whether the product or service is needed and what the target market is.
During quality mission development, the second step involves discussing the new product or service with the customer to determine if it's needed or desired. This helps Ann identify which attributes the customer values and which are not as important. (...)
This Quality Systems, Models and Theories course gives you all the information you need to be a quality systems educated professional. In less than 3 hours you are going to learn about Quality Practice and Quality Systems Theory.
You will learn about the importance of creating a clear quality mission and policy and the steps required to do so. You'll also learn about the developing and deploying a quality plan and a system for measuring its effectiveness.
Quality Practice
Quality Mission and Plans. Developing a quality mission requires collaboration among all organizational units, and is completed using several steps that we are going to learn together. The quality plan is a set of documentation that outlines an organization's quality practices, processes, and resources relating to a particular product or service.
Quality Plans Deployment. Every employee within an organization plays a part in the deployment of a quality plan. Upper management, middle management, and operative employees each play a unique and important role in rolling out the quality plan.
Measuring Effectiveness. Managers have several tools available to them to measure the strengths of their quality systems, each of which can give them a solid understanding of system effectiveness. The balanced scorecard is, one example, a measurement system that organizes a company's strategies into four balanced categories: financial, customer, internal business process and learning and growth.
And this course will provide you with a solid overview of the many different quality models and theories companies can use to improve their performance, as well as the impact various quality theorists have had on the quality movement.
Quality Systems
ISO 9000.
The ISO 9000 standards are based on eight principles of quality management that can be applied by senior managers to improve their organizations. Registration and implementation of the standards can provide companies with several benefits.
TQM. Total quality management (TQM) describes a Japanese-style approach to quality improvement, in which all members of an organization work to improve processes, products, and services, as well as their organization's culture.
CQI. Continuous quality improvement (CQI) recognizes the changing nature of customer needs. With its ultimate goal of customer satisfaction, CQI encourages managers to analyze capabilities and processes so they can be constantly improved.
Kaizen. Japanese companies use the term kaizen to describe continuous improvement at every level of an organization, which leads to improved products and services.
Six Sigma. Six Sigma has become a world standard and is significant to today's organizations that are using the methodology as part of their broader total quality management efforts to reduce process defects.
Benchmarking. An organization can use benchmarking to measure itself against best-in-class companies so it can improve its own performance. By using information gleaned from analyzing top competitors' practices, an organization can set and achieve goals that are both competitive and attainable.
Quality Theorists. Although there are far too many to discuss in detail, some of the key pioneers who have made significant contributions to the quality movement include Philip B. Crosby, W. Edwards Deming, Armand V. Feigenbaum, Kaoru Ishikawa, Joseph M. Juran, and Genichi Taguchi.
So, If you are interested in quality management and want the compact and information rich version of Quality Systems, Models and Theories, than this course is for you.
Thank you for your attention and see you in the course!
Quality standards
It's quite simple for an organization to reach the decision that it wants to improve quality.
However, without a set of standards to guide its improvement efforts, the company may struggle to decide where to start.
ISO
ISO is a nongovernmental, worldwide organization that encompasses the national standards institutes of more than 158 countries.
Officially, the organization is known as the "International Organization for Standardization." However, since the name would be abbreviated differently in several countries, the acronym ISO was chosen, based upon the Greek word isos, meaning "equal."
ISO 9000
The ISO 9000 series was developed to help organizations effectively design and implement efficient quality systems. The series consists of individual, yet interrelated, standards that complement each other and act as a framework that can provide auditable requirements for companies that want to complete registration.
Originally published in 1987, the ISO 9000 series has undergone revisions in 1994, 2000 and 2005, with the most recent revision creating standards for definitions, requirements, and continual improvement.
The ISO 9000 series has become an internationally recognized language for quality, and three concepts are universal to all markets.
ISO standards
Are first of all:
voluntary
market driven, and
based on consensus.
Because ISO is a nongovernmental organization, it doesn't have the authority to legally require companies to follow the standards. Thus, ISO is voluntary.
However, some countries have adopted certain standards – health, safety, or environmental, for instance – as part of their regulatory frameworks.
In such cases, even though ISO standards are voluntary, they may become a market requirement.
Market driven
ISO standards are market driven. This means that standards are developed when there is a market requirement, which is determined by a group of experts in the field who have asked for a particular standard.
Because ISO standards are based on consensus among interested groups, they are ensured widespread applicability. The standards are regularly reviewed, at least once every five years, to determine whether they should be modified, maintained, or withdrawn.
8 principles of ISO 9000
The ISO 9000 standards are based on eight principles of quality management that can be applied by senior managers to improve their organizations.
Customers are the backbone of most organizations, as they are depended upon to purchase goods and services. Companies should have a good understanding of their customers' needs and do their best to meet these requirements.
For example, a media company conducted a month-long study of its customers' needs and realized it was not placing enough emphasis on providing customer support. The company was able to remedy this problem to improve customer relations.
Effective leadership is a vital ISO 9000 quality principle, since leaders determine a company's direction and purpose. When leadership creates an environment in which employees want to be involved in achieving organizational objectives, everyone is inspired to produce quality results.
When the media company realized that customers were unhappy with its service, leadership had to get front-line employees onboard with the needed changes. To do so, a reward system was created to recognize customer-service reps who were especially helpful to customers, which inspired all employees to provide exceptional service.
Involvement of an organization's people is a key ISO 9000 quality management principle. When employees of all levels are involved in improving the company, a variety of talents and abilities can be used for the benefit of the company's quality improvement efforts.
The media company held a meeting with all employees to outline the problems it was having with customer dissatisfaction. All staff were encouraged to become involved with improving service and overall quality.
Taking a process approach to quality management means that all inputs, outputs, and resources related to a company's activities are managed as a process.
The media company revised the process it used to field customer complaints in its call center so that one standardized process existed, which led to greater efficiency and understanding among all employees involved with call center operations.
When the media company realized its customers were unhappy with the service it provided, it was able to use ISO 9000 quality principles to improve leadership, focus on its customers, encourage employee involvement, and use a process approach to quality management. (...) All Courses: https://www.udemy.com/u/sorindumitrascu
